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HalMorris comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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The nice thing about working with incentives is that they're pretty stable relative to political leanings. I'd expect a given person's perceptions of politicians' level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who's ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it's also harder to do.
That sounds very intriguing. Can you give some example of how you've used "playing with incentives" successfully to (I assume - correct me if I'm wrong) maintain a productive forum? That might be very enlightening - seriously, no irony here.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there's lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there's too much complaining going on (I didn't, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like "Constructive Criticism".
Sorry, I've never run a forum. Is there any easy place to learn enough to make "user titles are no longer based on postcount" make sense to me (unless you want to take the time to explain it). I really am very interested.
Sure. One feature in phpBB and several other popular bulletin board packages (but not in reddit or Slashdot or any of their descendants) is the ability to set user titles: little snippets of descriptive text that get displayed after a user's handle and which are usually intended to give some information about their status in the forum.
The most common arrangement is to have a couple of special titles for administrative positions (say, "mod" and "admin"), then several others for normal users that're tiered based on the number of posts the user's written, i.e. postcount: a user might start with the title "newbie" or "lurker", then progress through five or six cutely themed titles as they post more stuff. It's common for admins to change the exact titles and the progression pattern to suit the needs of the forum (a roleplaying forum for example might name them after monsters of increasing power), but uncommon to change the basic scheme.
You may notice that this doesn't differentiate on post quality.
Look up some of the karma discussions on this very site.